Money_ A Suicide Note - Martin Amis [113]
1 couldn't fucking believe it. Who's doing this to me? Who? First: Gary, the dad, 'Garfield' — the Lorne Guyland role. In the pre-credit sequence Lorne is glimpsed wearing dank pyjamas, carrying his clothes in a bundle as he is jeered from the marital bedroom. This is pretty well Lorne's best moment. After that it's all downhill. Although Lorne boasts constantly about his erudition, wealth and youthfulness, in reality (we find) he is illiterate, bankrupt and more or less senile. Yes, on his very last legs, is old Lorne. When he eventually blackmails the young dancer into the cot (a richly comic episode), old Lorne can't raise it. Raise it? He can't even find it. In his weepy frustration he takes a swipe at the sneering young beauty. She replies with a kick in the balls, and Lorne cracks like a broken stick. In the fight scene proper, an anoraked Lorne Guyland is given the hiding of his life, despite the fact that he surprises his sleeping co-star with a car-tool. His last, abject few lines are delivered from under a mummy-suit of plaster in an intensive-care unit. As for the son, Doug — as for Spunk Davis — well, to start with, his motive for hanging on to the mob heroin is as follows: he needs to fan the wildfire, the sparkling gorse, of his own narc habit, priced at a thousand dollars a day. A chain-smoker, a compulsive gambler, a hopeless lush and (what was Doris up to here?) a haggard handjob artist, Spunk also turns out to be a veritable guru or sorcerer of junk food, presiding over the vats in the restaurant kitchens with various lethal additives and glutinous flavourings. We are left to guess at the full extent of his sexual delinquencies, though in one haunting digression Spunk pays a 'charitable' visit to an orphanage with his mother: in a series of tight close-ups we see him doling out candy bars as he gooses and fondles the staring waifs.
Now for the ladies. If you were searching for a word to encapsulate the Caduta Massi character, then sterility would spring to your lips. The key to Caduta lay in how fantastically sterile she was. Boy, was she ever sterile! No extra kids for Caduta. No kids at all: Spunk himself (it crucially transpires) is her adopted son. Despite her husband's well-established impotence, and despite the on-screen celebration of her fifty-third birthday, Caduta kept talking about how many children she would one day bear. There were many symbolic moments in which Caduta gazed desolately at playgrounds full of laughing children or composed herself near jugs of wilted flowers. There was the visit to the orphanage. There was even a dream sequence where the fallow Caduta wandered alone in a boundless grey desert. How sterile can a woman get? Yes, you really felt for Caduta, what with this unbelievable sterility of hers. And Butch Beausoleil — the mistress, the dancer? I had expected Doris, as a fellow feminist, to honour Butch's single proviso. I had expected Butch to be spared the stock domestic chores, the dish-washing, the floor-sweeping, the bed-making. But no. So far as the Arthur screenplay was concerned, Butch could have been a representative figure called Drudgery in a commercial for labour-saving appliances. She peeled potatoes, lined dustbins, swabbed toilets. Even in the nightclub scenes Butch was forever rinsing glasses and ironing G-strings. Her chief dance routine featured a mime with mop and pail. And the other big thing about Butch? You guessed. You were there before me.